Portable electronic apparatus are increasingly able to support powerful software applications requiring sophisticated user interfaces. For example, laptop computers, mobile telephone handsets, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and digital communicator handsets can run browser software which enables a user to navigate content on a web page by selecting hypertext links.
Conventional mobile telephone handsets have an alphanumeric keypad comprising a set of dual-state keys arranged in a grid pattern. Although the keypad is appropriate for entering text and numbers, it is not particularly suited to navigating a web page because movement of a pointer or cursor is restricted to discrete steps and is constrained to orthogonal directions defined by the grid pattern.
The present invention seeks to provide an improved user interface.